El, how have you been doing? Good to hear from you. I've missed ya on the last few outings....hope you can make one next year.
Your question
"Hey Gregg, you've hunted with Monte and his Impact quite a few times now and was wonder what you think of it compared to your R2?"
Yep I hunted with Monte quite a few times since the Impact has been out. I raise hell sometimes and defend the R2, but the short answer is ....The Impact @14 Khz is the Racer 2 and a Whole lot more.
The long answer is.....Well, it depends.....Do you like simplicity or are you the kind of person that likes many many options to get every advantage that you can out of a machine. The Impact is not a complicated machine and really is straight forward and easy to set up in spite of its many many options. I think the trick or the hard part if you will is actually deciding on the many many options you have, which option is actually the one option that will give me the best advantage in the site that I am currently hunting?
I feel performance is the same, ie: take a Racer 2 and set it up in Di3 (three tone) for example and then take the Impact and set it up in 14Khz the same as the Racer 2, and using same coils I think you will see the same performance. What makes the Impact shine, and Cal Cobra's post a few weeks ago is a great example. He stated that he has a nasty salty/alkaline site that he hunts. The Racer 2 @14Khz was just not performing as well as it should in those conditions. With the Impact, he could tackle that same site with much better performance merely by using the Impact in 20Khz. So if 14Khz wasn't getting the job done, he could easily in a matter of a few seconds switch to 20Khz and problem solved, I don't have that option. In my opinion, I don't think one has a "pure performance" advantage over the other.I think the advantage of the Impact is that it gives you many options in which you can tackle many different environments. A generalized basic example would be if your hunting gold ( low conductors) use 20Khz, if you're in a clean park and silver (high conductor) is deep, try the 5Khz option. The point is the Impact will give you the ability to fine tune for the environment your hunting and/or targets your seeking.
When I met Monte years back, he said something to me that I have pretty much followed to this day
"Get a good performing machine and keep it simple" That philosophy has worked pretty well for me. When the Fors CoRe and Racer (Red) first released, it didn't take but a few times using those machines to realize, they did pretty darn good in the iron infested sites I like to hunt. Then they released the Racer 2 and they added one thing ( well maybe two) that I wanted and that was Iron Audio Volume and the tone breaks. I was a happy camper and I have just kinda stuck with the R2....it performs well and it's simple. Today I tackle the nasty iron infested sites with the R2 ( utilizing the Iron Audio) and if I want to hit the cleaner less trashy fringe areas of a site then I use the Fors CoRe with the 5.5 x 10 coil. The Fors CoRe to me has a better balance when using bigger coils.....so they make a great team. And maybe one advantage in my favor is that I am not all invested in one machine. If one machine breaks or fails I can fall back on the other machine. Instead of having all the eggs in one basket, I have a little redundancy............ (but then again who the hell only owns one detector LOL)
Since you asked me specifically my thoughts and opinions, well there ya go and more often than not, there prob wrong
By the way if you do get an Impact machine you got a pretty tech savvy guy in your neck of the woods that can prob squeeze every ounce of performance out of that Impact machine.....so if you have a bunch of tech questions send them to Cal Cobra.......but on the other hand if ya want to call so I can brag about a find I made by all means give me a shout
But like I said EL, is good hearing from you, hope all is well and really hope to see you again on a future outing.
gregg
